Column: Stopping sucker punches a challenge for liberal educators

We cannot all be nuclear physicists. For most, the math required is just too hard.

So what is the alternative, welfare? A new entitlement for lack of genius? No, education in massive doses at whatever levels attainable is required.

But what about dropouts? Whether sleeping in class or not bothering to attend, are we addressing a core problem — the unmotivated student? Is it politically incorrect to ask why so many unemployed aren’t educationally qualified for many of the jobs now available?

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Must we look the other way while the unmotivated draw welfare checks and food stamps? Must we pay for medical care for those who don’t want to work, much less learn? Because idleness is the devil’s workshop, many of the unmotivated also end up in jail. And now they also roam the streets to sucker punch innocent pedestrians, i.e. “the knockout game”.

Lack of education masks a more insidious problem inner city teachers know well. It’s caused by catastrophic lack of student motivation. Students from single parent homes, usually minorities, are rerouted into special education classes. Such holding tanks are desperate attempts to keep students in school and off the streets. But many of those eventually “graduating” are barely able to read, much less know their multiplication tables.

It has been almost 50 years since former Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Moynihan published The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, an analysis on the roots of black poverty in America that controversially concluded that the absence of the traditional nuclear family structure was to blame. Although his thesis that slavery had made black males submissive and unmotivated was roundly condemned by liberals, it propelled Moynihan into a distinguished career as a Democratic senator.

Feminists and other Moynihan detractors would never “blame the victim” for joblessness and poverty, instead glorifying matriarchal families. Even today, when unemployed or underemployed males get girlfriends pregnant and then can’t support them, community leaders won’t blame family structure. Instead, these apologists celebrate prideful “baby mommas” who often continue their education, find jobs and rely on grandma to babysit. Ann Coulter recently theorized that single women vote liberal because big government is a husband surrogate.

But still, the real fathers of these children remain unmotivated. For them, most jobs are dead end, hardly sufficient to support themselves, much less a family. Without a father figure for growing boys, the cycle continues. So why do our educators or politicians seem oblivious to a sociology that fosters chronic unemployment? Family intervention demonstrations in public housing, such as HOST, show promise, but why isn’t more underway?

Although President Johnson’s Great Society initiatives admittedly failed, why aren’t the liberals who dominate the education community proposing how to motivate fatherless boys? Albeit educators would scoff at Conservative suggestions and probably this writing too, shouldn’t their educational proximity to the problem produce proposed solutions?

Why not significant incentives for motivation to pursue job qualifying education? What about negative incentives too, such as ending unemployment benefits for the unmotivated? Why don’t unions open up trade jobs for plumbers, carpenters and electricians? Shouldn’t incentives be bold, even to jail releases? Shouldn’t transportation be provided to jobs, as well as housing? Last summer Michigan’s northern orchards could have employed many Detroit teens.

Because some jobs require Community College education, unaffordable to many regardless of student loans, something more is required. Whatever the solutions, all education levels must be addressed. How wasteful when people work at less than their potential, or not at all.

Moynihan wrote that national chaos could result if boys grow up without those stable family relationships grounded in male authority. He was proved right. Shouldn’t educators be proposing solutions?